Derrida wrote in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, which some have translated into English as the statement "there is no out-of-context". This passage on the matter appears in the English version of the Derrida Wikipedia page[1] as of 12/14/20:
“Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written "Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte" ("There is nothing outside the text") and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction [...] means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking."
This phrase (il n'y a pas de hors-texte) is famous in part for its being a founding concept for subjectivism, or standpoint epistemology, an important principle of the social justice literature. Unfortunately, this phrase contains the seeds of its own disproof.
If there is nothing outside of context, and especially in the sense meant by literature influenced by Derrida, then there is nothing outside the individual. Either this is solipsism, or other persons are admitted as contributing text to the context. For the sake of continuing the argument at all, we must assume the latter. Each individual receives sense impressions and builds a theory of the exterior world. Now, if we take seriously the attitude conveyed by the sentiment of Derrida, then the context of the individual is strongly their own and cannot possibly match that of another.
But let the contrary individual of the argument put forth the absolutely improbable theory that the world as they sense it matches the world as described by other persons. Each time they receive texts from other persons, they compare the text with what they know from their subjective experience. These comparisons invariably match: there is a sun, the sun does rise and set, grass is green and it grows, gravity makes things fall, we’re both hungry and let's have lunch. This theory, poised always on the precipice of disproof, nevertheless holds. This is the scientific method as described by Karl Popper[2].
And so there is an out of context, in that each of the other persons has brought their own context, and that has contributed to the continued confirmation of the theory of matching worlds.
But wait, you say, there is no matching. Each of those matching examples is trivial and incomplete. Because each of those other persons has different emotions, different oppressions, different privileges that have caused them their own hardship. So the theory of matching is disproven.
In this case, then it is the out of context persons who have contributed the confirmatory information necessary to disproving the matching. So once again, there is an out of context, which was a necessary feature of the disproof.
QED: There is something outside the context.
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